The Song of the Insider

At the heart of every great criminal enterprise, prosecutors will tell you, is an insider willing to sing. In Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia, potential informers were terrorized into silence by some of the most expert hit men in Europe. But with the ex-President behind bars, one man has emerged as stool pigeon No. 1. Mihalj Kertes, an unctuous 53-year-old of Hungarian descent, was head of the federal customs bureau in Belgrade — an unremarkable post in a normal country, but one that in Serbia placed him at the heart of an illegal network that extended to Milosevic, his inner circle and as...

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